In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his 'frog wife'. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen's little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince. She is only his night-time consort in what Sartre and Beauvoir grandly termed their 'morganatic' marriage, waiting to be loved and released into her true kingdom of the body and mind.

LRB 14 June 1990 | PDF Download